Memoir – English 101 – 2 – Growning Up

I was sitting at the kitchen table, my Latin homework spread out on it like blueprints. Furrowing my brow, I looked back at my translation, trying to figure out what it actually translated into. Tapping my pencil on the table, I honestly thought I had picked the wrong words.

Mom was sitting in front of me as I had commandeered Dad’s side of the table for my work, and she was annoyed that my papers spilled on her side of the table. She wouldn’t look at me, and I could feel her foot tapping through the floor.

Ignoring her, I rewrote my sentence hearing the phone ring. I ignored it, tired of having to stop in the middle of doing something to answer it. After all, Mom wasn’t doing anything else except smoking. She could get it.

She swept past me, ignoring me still as she was furious about my non-acceptance of her views. Her eyes were narrowed as she looked at me, and her lips tightened into a thin line. I didn’t know what her problem was, I was busy trying to make sense of my ‘quis’, ‘qui’ and ‘quem’s.

“She’s not here,” I heard her say. “Don’t you ever call here again! I don’t appreciate a dyke calling my daughter!” she hissed, slamming the phone back down into the cradle, and then I knew that it was Jen.

“Your dyke friend called.”

“I heard, Mom,” I replied absently, still working on my translation.

“Uppity bitch,” she muttered under her breath as she swept past me. “Heaven forbid anyone listens to me or anyone pays any attention to what I say.”

“I did, Mom. I’m just doing my Latin.”

“You’re ignoring me!”

At this point, I did ignore her. There were more important things to do, like finish translating fifty lines of Ovid that Mrs. George asked me to do, rather than listen to her piss and moan about how she’s not being ‘listened to’. I snorted to myself. I can tell you why no one listens to you, I thought to myself.

She refused to be at least somewhat quiet with her raving, so after carefully folding my papers in half and sticking them between the pristine white pages of my text, I gathered my work up and stood to leave the kitchen.

“That’s it. Run back to your room and ignore your stupid mother! You’re a hateful daughter!”

I hesitated at the entrance to the kitchen, feeling guilt prodding my insides. All the while, all I could think was ‘yes mother, you are a stupid bitch.’

 

“People are people, Cathy. We’re not always reasonable.” My uncle rubbed at his head, his skullcap bereft of any hair.

I made a noise in the back of my throat as I turned to stare at him. He gave me a sheepish smile as he rubbed his head again.

“I know
Dee
’s got you in an uproar. She’s in there tellin’ your Aunt June all about it. It’s gotta be her you’re thinkin’ about.” He nodded to me, and I was flabbergasted at his perceptiveness.

“Did she tell you what it was about?” I asked, afraid to know if my mother had poisoned him against me too. After all, Aunt Jan came down on me like a ton of bricks for even thinking about socializing with Jen.

“Somethin’ about you not listening to her,” he replied evasively.

“Well, do you wanna know?”

He looked at me, china blue eyes serious. “I want to help.”

We looked at each other for a while, oblivious to the outside world. What I saw in his eyes were love, compassion and pain that was eating him because I was in pain. With a curt nod, I started talking.

“I have a friend. She comes to me in tears, and I thought that this was strange. Jen being sad? I couldn’t fathom it. She’s always so bubbly and bright, it’s almost like you have a perpetual cavity.” I sighed, shaking my head as I turned my gaze to my fingers. “Come to find out, she came out of the closet. She’s… a lesbian, and her so-called best friend kicked her out of the car. She had to walk home from the middle of
Fairborn
. She came to me to find someone who wouldn’t turn her away.

I sneered, thinking of

Sabrina. “I can’t believe that Sabs would turn her away. They’d been friends since kindergarten, and she got all high and mighty on her Christian soap-box calling her evil and all sorts of bad things!” I sighed. “Then again, I see how Mom reacted to the news. It… wasn’t pretty.” I finished, hanging my head in shame when I thought about how I treated my mother.

“Did I ever tell you I had a friend who was Korean?”
            I shook my head, staring at my boots morosely.

“He was a little guy. Not more than ten. Parents were Gooks, you know, North Korean, but for some reason, he liked to stay around me.”

I smiled. “Who wouldn’t?”

He smiled back at me. “You’re biased. Anyway, he never understood why the hatred was there for the Marines that were trying to help his people.” He paused, his gaze becoming distant. “He never believed his parents, so they strapped him with a grenade and had him go blow up the truck I was on just moments before.” He shook his head. “I often wonder why parents would do that to their children, and then I realized that their hatred for us was stronger than their love for their son.”

He turned to look at me, his face serious. “Your mother loves you, she just doesn’t see eye-to-eye with you about it. Never forget that she’s trying to do what’s best for you, and she honestly thinks what she believes is correct. She’s gotta change herself all on her lonesome, and she will, probably after she’s driven you away, but she will, and she’s the one who’ll be sorry.”

 

 

            Sabrina, Sabs for short, was a small chipmunk of a girl. She had curly brown hair that was in constant disarray and huge thick glasses that made her eyes much larger than they were. She’d constantly wrinkle her nose, scrunching up her face in the process.

            She and I were coming back from church. She’d conned me into going with her because she needed ‘moral support’ for her solo of Sandi Patti’s Via Dolorosa. I was supposed to get ice cream out of the whole thing. Key word there was supposed. All she wanted was to talk about Jen and how much of an abomination she was.

            I heard Sabs talking, but her words weren’t making it to my brain for processing. Her voice just droned on to the chipper voice of Larry the Cucumber from the Veggie-Tales CD I had lent her. I was too busy watching the street lamps go by in a blur.

            “Cathy, you’re not listening to me!”

            I rolled my eyes as I turned away from the passing scenery to look back at her. “About what?”

            “About Jen! She betrayed me!”

            I blinked. “Betrayed? How?”

            “We were supposed to go on dates with our dates.”

            I shook my head. “You can still do that.”

            “No I can’t! She likes girls.”

            “So? What’s the difference? A double date is simply that, a double date.”

            “She’s a dyke.”

            I groaned flopping back into the seat. “Not this bullshit again.”

            “Watch your mouth! And what do you mean again?”

            “I’ve gotta deal with

this bigot attitude from Mom since Jen came out. I don’t want to hear it from you, who are supposedly her best friend.”

            “She’s not my best friend anymore. She’s going against the word of God.”

            “She’s happy, right?” I asked, sitting back up and turning to stare at her.

            “Yes… I suppose she is.”

            “So why can’t you handle it? She’s your friend, Sabs, and she wants to stay friends with you.” I watched how her chubby face went blank.

            “She’s against God. It’s in the Bible that a man must not love another man as he does a woman.”

            “Didn’t God also teach us to love one another in spite, or many because of our faults?”

            She slammed on the breaks of the car, flinging me against my seatbelt as she pulled to the side of the road. Once she threw it into park, she turned in her seat, her eyes seething. “Don’t quote scripture back at me, Cathy. You’ve never been to Church so you don’t know what it means.”

            “I know that God wants us to love one another, not hate one another. And look at yourself. You’re not exactly a paragon of Christianity! You like to let the old bitches at your church decide your life for you! God gave us a mind to reason with, Sabs, and Joe was a good man. He worshiped the ground you walked upon! And what do you do? You tear out his heart, slice it up, and fed it back to him! It’s no wonder why he joined the Air Force! It was to get away from you!”

            She was purple in the face, her glasses not hiding the fact that I knew she knew I was right. She turned back around, staring straight ahead. “Get out of the car.”

            “What?”

            “I said to get out of the car. Are you that stupid?”

            I watched her as her knuckles turned white on the steering wheel.

            “We can’t let the church make judgment calls on who we can and can’t be friends with, Sabs. I hope you realize that you were given your brain for a reason and not just mindless worshiping of a god.”

            “I said get out!”

            Nodding to myself, I unbuckled my seatbelt, grabbed my bag and slid out of the car. Before I shut the door, I leaned back in to gaze at her. “Jen’s human too, Sabs. She deserves common curtsey, decent treatment, humanity. That’s Gods rule too, and it applies whether or not you think she deserves it. We’re all God’s children. We fight, we squabble, but what holds us together is His motto of love thy neighbor, and despite what you think, Sabs, I love Jen. She’s the sister I never had, and to be perfectly frank, I don’t give a fuck that she is a lesbian. I love her in spite of it, like you should too.”

            With that, I slammed the door and started walking home. I didn’t pay any attention to Sabs as she turned the car around and drove back home. I was, after all, over a mile away from my own home, but that didn’t matter to me.

            I smiled as I waved to the little old lady that lived on the corner of
Colorado
and
Upper Bellbrook Road
as I made my way home in the night. I tilted my head up, looking at the bright stars that I could see through the bright street lights, and I smiled.

            I remembered what my Uncle Virg said on one hot summer’s day, and I realized&h

ellip; he was right.

 

 

Six years later, I would paraphrase those words to a whole audience.

The last time I visited the faded blue steps wasn’t a happy occasion, then again, perhaps it was.

The box was a golden pine, the setting sun glimmering off the lacquered top. I stroked my fingers reverently across the top, tears tearing at my vision as my throat closed painfully tight. The edges bit into my fingers as I clutched the box close to my chest. My breath hitched painfully tight as I sat on the porch alone in my misery.

I didn’t notice the people that were walking up and down the street beyond the chain link fence, didn’t hear the comments of condolence. All that I wanted and felt I could do was sit there with that box, almost daring any other to come close enough so that I could snap at them and vent the swirling mist of anger and hatred at someone.

I opened the box, staring inside at the plush red velvet.  What was inside was given to me. I was to keep it safe for the children I would someday have.

The light glinted off the bronze metal giving it a copper glow. The center star shimmered and it seemed alive as I sat there, tears running down my face as I remembered sitting on these very same steps hearing about his medals and how he wasn’t proud of them, that he was just doing what any regular Joe would do. It felt like he was sitting right next to me, giving me that sheepish smile and rubbing his shiny head.

My uncle’s great heart had finally failed him, and everyone was too shaken up with his sudden death that no one could do anything. Thus, I was given the charge of writing his eulogy.

I stared at the blinking cursor all night, trying to find the right words for a man who defied language. It was 5 am when the phone rang.

“Hey, Cat. Sorry to hear about your uncle. He was a nice guy.”

“Yeah, thanks…”

“He liked me, which is saying something!”

“He liked everyone. He was just that type of man, Jen. He never judged anyone, even the Koreans he was fighting that wounded him.” I sat there, the phone to my ear as I watched the cursor blinking at me, mocking me. “Sno, I don’t know what to write,” I replied softly, as I ran my free fingers along the edges of my uncle’s bronze star. I had brought it out, trying to create my own valor, mustering up my very own courage which had disappeared. It was simply a comforting presence. “I just don’t know…”

“Write what he told you. Remember him, Cat, don’t mourn him. That’s the way it should be.”

I nodded and then I realized that she couldn’t hear the marbles rattle in my head. “Yeah… but I can’t get the first thing outta my head and onto paper.”

“How bout you start with ‘Mr. Lawson was never a judgmental man.’ That’s sure to be a good starting point.”

I thought about it, digesting it over and over. “Hey, Jen…”

“Yes?”

“Thanks. I think I got it.’

“Good. You think your mom’ll kill me if I show up tomorrow?”

“She can’t. It’s a church. Like Highlander, you know?”

“Alright, I’ll be there. We’ll see how long we can get his procession!” With that, she hung up the phone, and with new determination, I started back to his eulogy.

This time, I knew exactly what to write.

Virgil Dwight Lawson, Marine, Korean War Vet, recipient of the Bronze Star of Valor and two Purple Hearts,  was a friend to everyone, even those who others hated…